T w e n t y S i d e d
Just fiddling with my feed vs. bloglines. Nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Bloglines Test Post”
DM of the Rings I:
The Copious Backstory
Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.
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My new toy
Comic Book Creator is a lot of fun. In fact, it’s responsible for the total lack of posting here on Monday. It’s a handy tool for making making comic pages, arranging images, adding text bubbles, and so on.
Back when I was writing The Lemon I found that making comics was my favorite part of the site. At the bottom of this post is a comic I did back in 2003. I had a blast with it, but making comics using Paint Shop or Photoshop is a major pain in the butt. The comic below took me the better part of a day to put together. I think it would be a one or two hour job using CBC.
I enjoy making these little comics, although my desire to make them exceeds my ability to fill them with interesting content.
Oh yeah, the comic is huge so I’m not going to put it on the front page. Read on to see the whole thing: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My new toy”
Bloglines
Gothmog and ARJ mentioned that my hotlink protection image showed up while viewing the site feed on Bloglines. I’ve fixed this, but I just want to ask that if anyone else sees that thing that they let me know. Nobody who reads this blog should see that thing by accident. If you’re using another bloglines-like setup and the evil flashing hotlink image shows up, please tell me. It’s only there to fend off the MySpace leeches, who have a ravenous appetite for other people’s bandwidth and images.
(What I WISH I could do is blacklist certain domains. Right now the hotlink protection bans all hotlinks, and then has a whitelist where I can add domains to allow. I wish I could just ban myspace and a few of the larger forums. That would solve 95% of the problem without affecting the performance of the blog in any way.)
Also, while viewing my site via bloglines the images never work. Bloglines is just convinced that my images directory is parallel to the blog directory, and I can’t find any way to tell it otherwise. It wants to draw images from:
shamusyoung.com/images
Instead of:
shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images
The latter is correct and makes the most sense to me. I have no idea what Bloglines thinks it’s doing. I just can’t find the controls anywhere to fix this. Anyone have any suggestions?
Feeling better
Way back at the end of May I mentioned that I broke my ribs. Then a couple of weeks later I left a cryptic comment in this post that things “didn’t go my way”. Since everyone was nice enough to put up with my complaints, I thought it would be fitting that I let everyone know that I’m doing quite a bit better.
And about that bad weekend…
What happened was this: My back went out. I’ve been typing more or less since I was twelve, so my back is really messed up by now and it goes out from time to time. Well, I was already dealing with pain from my ribs when suddenly the muscles in my lower back spasmed and I couldn’t hold myself up any more. Unable to use my arms properly (in this case, quickly) because of the ribs, I managed to fall face-down on my left side, which is where my broken ribs were. This set the healing process back quite a bit. I didn’t mention this at the time, since everyone had endured enough complaints already. But now that I’m better I feel okay talking about it.
I’ve since recovered fully, although with a new appreciation for how devastating simple mishaps can be. The worst part of this is that I seem to have inflated a bit. A few months of no exercise whatsoever has caused my physique to expand to Jabba-like proportions. Time to do something about that. I may even resort to the drastic measure of direct exercise. I try to keep my exercise limited to manual labor projects or mowing the lawn. (I actually really enjoy mowing.) I need all the exercise I can get, but I hate exercise for it’s own sake. I have a treadmill, but using it feels dull and pointless. I’m using electricity to help me burn energy? How much sense does that make? If I’m going to burn energy, I feel like I should be accomplishing something.
But this is all good. When you have the freedom to choose what sort of elective exercise you want to engage in, it means you are living better than most of humanity. So I’m not complaining. Life, while not perfect, is still pretty darn good.
Thanks for the well-wishes everyone.
Quake 4: Stroggification
The big twist of Quake 4 is that your character is captured by the Strogg and gets turned into one of them. This is very much like being assimilated by the Borg, except you get rescued just before it finishes, so you get to keep your free will. This is one of those things which should have been a surprise, but every article, review, and preview of the game made a point of announcing it. They gave it away in great big block letters and gigantic screenshots. Nobody treated like a spoiler, and it should have been.
While playing through the game, I knew it was coming. Instead of feeling panic and shock, I thought, “finally!” This took a lot of the impact of the event away and ruined the most powerful moment in the game.
But I want to talk about this a bit, because a lot of thought went into this. Read on for more spoilers. Note that I’m going to have some gross (violent) screenshots, so you might want to steer clear if you dislike that sort of thing:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quake 4: Stroggification”
Ernesto
The remnants of Ernesto have been sputtering all over my labor day weekend, turning the world into something the color of a Windows dialog box: A dull, joyless gray. It started out as a hurricane, downshifted to tropical storm, ran aground and turned into a pathetic shadow of its former self. It’s not so much a storm as a meteorological complaint.
Dangit, if you’re going to ruin my labor day, the least you could do is be spectacular about it. Let’s see some wind! Some downpour! You’re wasting everyone’s time!
From The Archives:
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.